Jagged Alliance 2: Unfinished Business

The Good
At first glance this seems like your normal addon, new weapons, new characters, and a new but smaller campaign. Well, that's not true, the new campaign is totally different from the original. It's competely linear, you go from sector to sector, and the element of silver mines, multiple squads and etc... are completely gone. This doesn't have to be a bad thing though. The game can actually be best compared to the JA2 demo, the demo had only two maps which had no variations, you meet the enemies at the same place and all. In the full version of JA2 it wasn't like this, the enemy was constantly moving, the enemy placement was mostly random. In that regard JA2 has massive replayability since things were different each time, but JA2UB can also be more fun in another aspect, the authors had more freedom in UB when making the missions since nothing was random, the missions made were exactly as they would be played, so the missions can be a whole lot more fun as they have more substance then JA2's missions (although the essence of replayability is totally gone in UB). Unfortunately, this isn't totally so, the levels are not well made, but I'll get back to that later.

About the other new things. There's two new handy options you can use in tactical warfare, with two buttons you can see where your current mercenary can shoot, and where it's best for him to take cover. This is a nice feature, although I doubt you'll use it any much... at least I didn't, most of time you should know yourself where to take cover. There's some new mercenaries, including a tourist you met in JA2, and an oldtimer from JA1. The new mercs are completely cool, they have perfect voice acting and unique personalities. Although there's one stupid thing here, at one point in the game, it's random whether or not you'll meet a certain merc. And if you don't meet him, you'll just have to start a new game to see if you meet him then. This is not good, I especially hated it since I knew beforehand about this merc and I really wanted him on my team and check him out, but no, I didn't meet him, and I really don't feel like playing it again just to meet him since the game really doesn't bring anything new the second time around.

The new weaponry kicks ass, the most obvious addition is three new sniper rifles which change the game totally. Those who say that the sniper rifles in the original JA2 was useless then check this out, they are a lot more powerful than the ones in JA2. With these rifles the game is definately more interesting. Yeah, one thing I almost forgot, you can also import any savegame from JA2 to use your old custom merc into this game, there's even new speech made for all the custom merc voices which is a nice touch.

The Bad
As I mentioned the missions aren't designed any well. Well, this both true and untrue, the missions are fun, but not as fun as they could have been. With the design of UB they had so much more freedom in the design of the sectors, but the missions just felt like generic-map-with-random-enemies similar to JA2. Another bad thing is the imbalanced difficulty setting. The game starts right off where JA2 left, you have powerful weaponry, the enemies have high stats and powerful weapons. This is more than okay for outdoors sectors, but when you get to buildings things get really dull. Indoor combat: the AI feels like camping all the time and waits for you to walk to them, the enemies have the best weapons and high stats so if they see you, they get the first shot, they don't miss, and they kill straight away. This spoils a lot of the fun, the element of strategy is completely gone, your only choice is to constantly sacrifice one of your troops to kill the enemies.

This is the major flaw though, but there's some other minors, the campaign is small, the art of the new weapons is very dull and uninspired, and the game has some bugs here and there.

The Bottom Line
I enjoyed the game, but that's probably mainly because I'm such a big JA2 fan that anything else would be impossible. What really saves the game is the level editor with the game. There's already a great deal of fanmade campaigns posted around the net to prolong your bloodshed, and most of them seems a lot more fun than the original standard campaign too. The game is a must have for any JA2 fan, sure there are flaws and you can complete the game in a few days, but you can always make more missions yourself or just download some. For those who haven't played any JA game, don't buy this one, start with buying JA2, it's definately the best in the series.